Doctor Without Borders

A letter in response to Michael Specter’s article (February 4, 2013)

Specter writes that Oz hired me to stand in the operating room, where I would attempt to harness “the body’s own energy to help patients survive risky operations, such as heart transplants.” In fact, I do not perform Reiki, and Oz never hired me. I volunteered to work with him both as a consultant on alternative medical practices that could help cardiac patients and as a healer. I proposed a protocol for a hypnosis experiment, which he adopted, and I then went on to work with patients not involved in that experiment before and after surgery. After some success with this, I suggested working in the operating room as well, by monitoring the emotions of the patient and the traumatic memories that came up during the surgery and helping the patient process them, which Oz initially resisted. I never went near the heart-lung machine, but stood with my hands on the patient’s head for most of the surgery. In heart-transplant surgeries, I would go to the ice chest to try to get a reading on the history of the heart that was coming into the new body, and pick up information about how the donor had died. My patients consistently required less anesthesia and less post-operation pain medication than normal, and all of the heart-transplant patients with whom I worked had no rejection on their first biopsies. I stopped working with Oz because I got a grant to work with women undergoing surgery for breast cancer.

Julie Motz

Fairfax, Calif.

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